Meta-content analysis and annotation of email and other electronic documents

Abstract

Meta-content analysis and annotation upon the body of email documents, and other electronic documents, and to create a displayable index of these instances of meta-content, which is sorted and annotated by type are provided. In addition, the electronic document is enhanced by providing links for the semantic foci to external documents containing related information. An electronic document adapted for delivery to one or more recipients, the electronic document including a header and a body, is processed by:performing meta-content extraction of semantic foci within said header and said body, the semantic foci comprising a plurality of type of information including one or more of email addresses, URLs, dates, currency values, organization names, names of people, names of places, and phone numbers;creating a meta-content index the document based upon said extracted semantic foci;arranging the meta-index according to said plurality of types;combining said meta-content index with said header and said body to provide an enhanced document; andsending said enhanced document to said one or more recipients via a communication network.The process includes converting the electronic mail document to a markup language format, and wherein said meta-content index comprises one or more objects expressed in said markup language adapted for presentation with body in said enhanced document.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]1. Field of the Invention[0002]The present invention relates to electronic documents intended for transmission to recipients, such as email documents produced and transmitted by electronic mail services. The invention also relates to the creation, extraction, presentation and other actions related to meta-content for such documents.[0003]2. Description of Related Art[0004]The present format typical email documents is analogous to that of the isolated page of text before the advent of hypertext linking. With the exception of sender-specified attachments and in-line universal resource locators (URL's), email documents are, for the most part, static text. Semantic foci within the text of email documents are often difficult to identify for use by recipients.[0005]Meta-content has been used for analyzing electronic documents in a variety of settings. Such meta-content may be descriptive matter, extrapolation, summary and / or interpolation of content that e...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The present invention provides a system and method for analyzing and annotating email documents and other electronic documents. The system extracts semantic foci, such as email addresses, URLs, and other information that provides a focus of the document, and creates an enhanced document by adding presentation attributes and hyperlinks to the extracted foci. The enhanced document can be sent to recipients and serves as a useful means of summarization and precis. The technical effects of the invention include improved searchability, easier understanding of email documents, and improved communication with external documents."

Problems solved by technology

Some lexical items within an email document contain greater inherent semantic weight (e.g. dates, email addresses, names of people, names of organizations), but receive no special markings and can thereby become lost in the noise of the surrounding text.

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